Motherload

My mother-in-law's raspberry cupcakes Ever the student, I have learnt a lot from this (fingers crossed) minor encounter with cancer. It's to do with how I cope best – through silence, telling almost no one, yoga, exercise, practicality, being Dutch about the whole thing, cutting out any white noise that derails me, being more ruthlessly focused than I normally let people know I am, looking at the positive and the concrete over the chimerical and the negative. And jokes. The negative is, of course, there, I don't deny it, lurking about in an anti-matterish sort of way, but, in my life, I have welcomed in far too much of that, felt I had to be negativity's caretaker. And that is linked to allowing myself to be bullied, and miserable. I'll take Newtonian over Quantum mechanics for the time being. The sub-molecular level will have to wait. What I've learnt is… that a well-timed joke has a therapeutic power as great as a surgeon's blade. I'll ne...

Pre-op Dutch Courage So Motherload fans, I've been quite absent from this blog for a while, and I've got an excuse. On Thursday I had surgery to excise some very early breast cancer. Now, this won't be a long post, because I'm still post-op and a bit tired. But I wanted to pass on a few things that have interested me on this journey. 1. I found my lump on 22 February 2016. This also happened to be the second anniversary of the death of a wonderful friend, Jane. She was the bravest woman I have ever met. She died of ovarian cancer. We met, the day after her diagnosis, when my little girl went round to play with her little girl. We looked at each other and burst out laughing. What is the etiquette for a playdate chat about ovarian cancer with a mum you've never met before? We became firm friends. We learnt mindfulness together during six sun-filled weeks in her kitchen, as her cat strolled in and moved around us, happy and curious. Another friend I'...

Race for life This weekend, my daughter and I did the local 5k Race for Life ( thank you, you can still donate! ), to raise money for research into cancer. This is the third time we've done it, and it's become a bit of a tradition to see whether we can beat the previous year's time. Logically this should work, because as my daughter gets older, she gets taller and faster. We won't go into what happens to her mother.  I didn't sleep well, and woke already tired and fretful. The rain had bucketed the night before, and the terrain was soggy, so I suggested that she and I head into the runners' group, so that we'd have a fresh start — we weren't going for a runner's time, we just didn't want to be slipping over in the churn.  Within only a few moments, daughter was straggling and slowing to a walk. Not yet well breathed, I was hopping up and down and urging her forwards in what I hoped wasn't too obviously a stentorian manner. She seem...

What am I learning about modern parenting? Two things. 1. Legoland — a metaphor for alienation. 2. Race for Life — a metaphor for frustrated ambition. Let me explain. Marx (and I paraphrase) felt that people were being alienated from the means of production of things like food and clothing. Instead they went to work in mines, cities and factories, were paid money and then had to commute home to give this money to their families, to pay for things. They seemed to be gaining autonomy, but were actually losing control over their lives. This was in the sense of the overall arc of those lives, their destinies (getting work started to depend on your education rather than, say, farming your own bit of land). It was also at the level of day-to-day human pleasure (growing your own tomatoes; making your own shirts). He thought this as England's green and pleasant land was overrun by factories during the 19th century. The rest of us called it the Industrial Revolution. You can un...